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[TamerVirus]

New York State officially now has more Coronavirus (159,937 cases) than anywhere else in the world!
Number 1, baybee

[IcyTea31]

I just received a letter from the Ministry of Social Affairs and Health warning me about the virus. It had some decent information on how to protect yourself and those around you, and better late than never I suppose, but it would have been most useful about three months ago.

[McTraveller]

My state seems to be past peak on the daily new cases front (today was the fewest new cases in 8 days), but not yet peaked in daily mortality.

Our stay at home order just got extended from April 13 to April 30 which is good (if not exhausting*).  There is starting to be some talk about what the "return to work" process is going to look like; nothing formal but there is talk of phased return, requiring masks at work, etc.  I'm pleased the state leaders are at least thinking about it before people look at the numbers and go "oh we're all good now!"

*The 2019-2020 school year was already cancelled entirely though, except for remote-learning.

[martinuzz]

Corona has now spread to 4 out of 12 US aircraft carriers, although the outbreak on the Roosevelt remains the most serious, with the number of infected rising from 286 to 416 in the past 24h.  One has now been admittted to ICU.

The Pentagon warns that more large outbreaks are bound to happen on US Navy vessels, and urges that plans need to be made on how to deal with these situations and prepare for them.

Meanwhile, the French ministry of defense reports that 40 out of 1700 crew of the Charles de Gaulle show symptoms of corona.  The carrier's training mission has been aborted and it has returned to Toulon.

[Jimmy]

Y'know, if any country happened to be sitting on a stockpile of deadly bioweapons and was concerned about their more traditional means of expressing military force being unavailable, right now would be the ideal time to release them. With most places having shut their airports, you'd have a great way to release your weapon into a foreign country and avoid it potentially coming back to you.

Probably best to wait until the target country declares itself COVID-19 free and reopens their internal transport, though.

[delphonso]

So here's my experience in Guangzhou:

Surprisingly easy to get in - didn't encounter any codes to scan, checkpoints, or tracking. Seems this has lightened up on the highways at least. I rode in with a private driver - as public transit doesn't connect to Guangzhou. I expect it would have been much more difficult to travel had I used public transit.

In the city itself, every single person was wearing a mask. Maybe saw two people without one. A couple people had their masks down for smoking cigarettes, though - but at least that's still filtered.

I noticed the air was definitely clearer than the last time I was in Guangzhou. That was a couple years ago though, and it rained a lot recently, so that could be 100% confirmation bias.

Hotels were incredibly strict. My reservation was cancelled upon me arriving (despite knowing I was a foreigner before I arrived in the city...) and a few other hotels shuffled me away without letting me talk. Apparently there are stricter guidelines about which hotels can accept foreigners - I was given a list of 3 in the district (all 3km from where I was) and all three were full or refused service for me. Found one that wasn't on the list that would let me in - took about 30 minutes of paperwork when I arrived. Basically just confirming I hadn't travelled abroad, hadn't been to Wuhan, and didn't have any symptoms. Inconvenient, but not impossible by any means. Had I arrived in the city very late, it might have been an issue. This isn't entirely new - some hotels don't have a license to register foreigners, so they can't even accept them. I've run into that a few times while travelling - mostly in touristy places popular with Chinese but not popular with foreigners - but never in a big city.

I talked with a guy from Shenzhen for a bit - it took him two hours to find parking and also had to fill out similar forms to what I had to - so a lot of these precautions are also applied to Chinese people. Fun note: his friends had also assumed that the US calling its citizens back was going to be the start of the great Sino-American war. Must be a common WeChat conspiracy theory.

The only real issue I had was getting out of Guangzhou. Again, looking for a hired driver (similar to Uber, I guess) I was refused service a few times because "the other passengers wouldn't be comfortable with that." One dickhead went so far as to say that even a driver from Wuhan wouldn't take a foreigner in his car. To prove him wrong, the next driver I contacted picked me up and just double checked that I'd been here a while. He told the other passengers that we picked up that it wasn't an issue and was a real nice dude.

Things honestly seem to be getting back to normal - shops were mostly open, but some with some different policies (small convenience shops just had their staff sitting by the door, you tell them what you want and they'd fetch it for you.) A lot of gyms had shut down, but there were also two gyms on every block, so that could be unrelated. The city was pretty alive still - joggers in the park, business people shuffling around, and cafes pumping out the smell of coffee. Light at the end of the tunnel, maybe, if there aren't any huge outbreaks, we should be back to normal in a month, I'd think. Wuhan has lifted its quarantine, and I think the Wuhanese are probably facing much more discrimination than foreigners are at this point.

[nenjin]

Makes you think though.....can you imagine if on average US businesses had rules about foreigners on the books? We have laws going the exact opposite direction.

[coalboat]

Good to hear the Guangzhou adventure went without too much trouble!

joggers in the park

Some joggers have been jogging all the time wearing mask... Admirable. I had been jogging regularly but never jogged again after January.

[Trekkin]

Hey, folks. Got a request for you.

In a few weeks/months, you might hear something about a compound that can possibly neutralize the virus, whether or not it's a therapeutic or just some kind of super-disinfectant. That compound probably will not be available to you for free as soon as you hear about it. It will probably be deployed according to some scheme with which you disagree ideologically to some degree, quite possibly according to guidelines that don't seem sensible to you -- and which may seem to fit a conspiratorial motive.

I'd just like you to keep in mind, when you're looking for someone to hate for that, that not everyone involved in trying to cure this has the ability to decide when and where it gets cured. This is almost certainly going to be a collaborative effort, which generally means the lawyers dictate when and where and how and with whom the actual scientists can do science -- and because the production chains are so elaborate, even once a formula exists, there's no way anyone involved on the science end can smuggle it out and post it online and somehow get it in production any faster or delay it to hurt Trump's reelection or make it kill the people you hate or whatever else you want. To the degree any of that is even possible, it's in the hands of the manufacturers.

I realize that this will, in many cases, fall on deaf ears, or at least ones so deranged that ideologically inconvenient information is simply dismissed outright. For the rest of you, though, it would be nice if you bore in mind that the scientists behind the efforts to cure this thing have no power to decide when and where it's deployed, and maybe didn't rant about how my friends and colleagues deserve to die. Most of them are overstressed as it is, and they all genuinely want to help everyone they can.

[delphonso]

Also forgot to mention the odd lack of temperature checks where I expected them - the hotel checked my temperature only after I filled out all the paperwork and I was inside the embassy by the time they checked me there. I'd expect them to do it earlier - some hotels had tables out front and would check people before letting them walk into the lobby.

Makes you think though.....can you imagine if on average US businesses had rules about foreigners on the books? We have laws going the exact opposite direction.

As far as I understand it, it isn't directed at foreigners. There are illegal hotels here which will take anyone including people without Chinese IDs - the way it was explained to me, these are mostly criminals dodging tracking or husbands cheating on their wives with prostitutes, but honestly I have no idea. IDs are required at all legal hotels, but since foreigners don't have IDs, special provisions were made and it's just a process of registering your business as being able to cater to passports and not just ID cards. Tourist locations for Chinese see so few foreigners that they just never bother. It's a bit like credit cards in the US - if you don't have one, hotels and rental cars are impossible.

The quarantine provisions are probably to do with responsibility if infection spreads. I reckon those hotels for foreigners are also for anyone who has been in Hubei recently, and anyone with a Hubei accent is probably getting much more of a run-around. On second thought, it must be for "high-risk" individuals (currently any foreigner and anyone from Hubei) because the hotel list was in Chinese.

Some joggers have been jogging all the time wearing mask... Admirable. I had been jogging regularly but never jogged again after January.

Sad to say I've put on a couple kilos during all this - lack of exercise being the culprit...

[coalboat]

As far as I understand it, it isn't directed at foreigners.

Indeed. Hubeiese and especially Wuhanese have been denied service around the country since February.

[nenjin]

Hey, folks. Got a request for you.

In a few weeks/months, you might hear something about a compound that can possibly neutralize the virus, whether or not it's a therapeutic or just some kind of super-disinfectant. That compound probably will not be available to you for free as soon as you hear about it. It will probably be deployed according to some scheme with which you disagree ideologically to some degree, quite possibly according to guidelines that don't seem sensible to you -- and which may seem to fit a conspiratorial motive.

I'd just like you to keep in mind, when you're looking for someone to hate for that, that not everyone involved in trying to cure this has the ability to decide when and where it gets cured. This is almost certainly going to be a collaborative effort, which generally means the lawyers dictate when and where and how and with whom the actual scientists can do science -- and because the production chains are so elaborate, even once a formula exists, there's no way anyone involved on the science end can smuggle it out and post it online and somehow get it in production any faster or delay it to hurt Trump's reelection or make it kill the people you hate or whatever else you want. To the degree any of that is even possible, it's in the hands of the manufacturers.

I realize that this will, in many cases, fall on deaf ears, or at least ones so deranged that ideologically inconvenient information is simply dismissed outright. For the rest of you, though, it would be nice if you bore in mind that the scientists behind the efforts to cure this thing have no power to decide when and where it's deployed, and maybe didn't rant about how my friends and colleagues deserve to die. Most of them are overstressed as it is, and they all genuinely want to help everyone they can.

I assume you're obliquely referencing hydroxychloroquine?

[wierd]

There are a number of rushed human trials for a number of vaccines for covid-19.  If any of them pan out, it could result in a mass-inoculation, similar to what was done with polio.

However, due to the way things work, (where money talks, and distribution systems are what they are), situations where it looks like the 1% are letting everyone else die, etc-- are unavoidable. Which is what he is getting at.

Trekkin is asking you very politely to not go on a murderous rampage when/if that happens.

[Egan_BW]

I'd hope that most people unsatisfied with things like that understand that it's just a symptom of the system being sick and not a conspiracy among the people who are actually trying to help. But maybe I'm too optimistic.

[Trekkin]

Trekkin is asking you very politely to not go on a murderous rampage when/if that happens.

Technically, I'm asking you all to exclude whoever's reported as the discoverer of the vaccine (EDIT: or entry inhibitor) from any murderous rampages you might decide to go on.